Iraq Official Says Iran's Military Mastermind Is In Charge

A
former CIA operative described Qassem Suleimani, the head of
Iran’s Quds Force, as the “most powerful operative in the Middle
East today.”Fars
News

Qassem Suleimani, the head of the Qods Force, the foreign arm of
Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps, is leading the Iraqi reaction
to a radical Islamist group's takeover of much of the country,
according to a senior Iraqi official
quoted by The Guardian.

"Who do you think is running
the war? Those three senior generals who ran away?" the unnamed
official asked The Guardian's Martin Chulov. "Qassem Suleimani is
in charge. And reporting directly to him are the militias, led by
Asa'ib ahl al-Haq."

Asaib ahl al-Haq (AAH) organization is one of
several Iraqi groups that serve as instruments of Iranian policy
through the region, as University of Maryland researcher Philip
Smyth
explained in a policy brief for the Washington Institute for
Near East Policy earlier this week.

Specifically, it is a Shiite militia and Iranian proxy in Iraq
that deployed fighters to the Syrian theater to support the
regime of Bashar Assad. But Smyth writes that AAH fighters have
now been recalled to Iraq to combat the Islamic State of Iraq and
the Levant (ISIS), the al-Qaeda
castoff that took over vast stretches of the country's
oil-producing north last week.

"Many of the Shiite Islamist forces fighting in Iraq
operate as part of Iranian proxy groups that have been attached
to [Iraqi Security Forces] and Iraqi army units," Smyth wrote.
"Some even operate as a direct part of these official Iraqi
military forces."

So it would make sense if Suleimani were calling the shots inside
of Iraq itself. He's responsible for arming and organizing
sectarian militias that are semi-integrated into the official
security apparatus in parts of the country. And he was in Baghdad
meeting with Shiite parliamentarians not long before things
escalated.

It's a place he knows well. In his
profile of Suleimani for The New Yorker last year, Dexter
Filkins recounted how the Qods Force chief used his connections
in Iraq to play the Americans, Sunni terrorists, and Shiite proxy
militias off of one other during the U.S.'s military presence in
the country. He even visited Baghdad's Green Zone:

Throughout the war, [Suleimani] summoned Iraqi leaders to
Tehran to broker deals, usually intended to maximize Shiite
power. At least once, he even traveled into the heart of American
power in Baghdad. “Suleimani came into the Green Zone to meet the
Iraqis,” the Iraqi politician told me. “I think the Americans
wanted to arrest him, but they figured they couldn’t.”

Suleimani is deeply invested in keeping together the
network of influence and control that he spent much of the past
decade building in Iraq. Still a major open question: whether
he'll
have the U.S. on his side in his efforts.